Bizarre Creations Interview

We get the inside story on the new must-have game for Xbox Live Arcade, Boom Boom Rocket, directly from the creators at Bizarre Creations.

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Kikizo: Definitely. Just looking at the visuals of the game, the actual cityscapes are pretty detailed, why did you put some much effort into these very interesting backdrops?

Sam: Well coming from the heritage we've got, it's about making great looking cities. Obviously we've got a lot of experience with that. We use that experience and we just like to make our games look good.

Nick: I think Bizarre likes to set itself a good high quality bar; the company wouldn't be happy producing something that they didn't think was as good as they could produce. And hopefully we've come up with a game that meets those standards.

Kikizo: So are these city assets something that you could potentially use for Project Gotham Racing 4?!

Nick: Not quite but certainly there's a lot of the experience that the company has had from building cities to a level of detail with Gotham. I mean in this game you don't get to see the cities as close up obviously as in Gotham, but certainly a lot of knowing what works and what doesn't for Gotham, definitely came in useful.

Kikizo: Can you tell us from a technical point of view why it's not possible custom soundtracks (your own music) that you can play levels to - does the rhythm action input really have to be predetermined?

Sam: We did kind of toy with that idea.

Nick: Technically, I think it's awkward, I mean it's not something that we wouldn't consider doing, it's mainly that it would just take a lot of time to get it right. It's a lot easier to hand-build a level to the game that you know plays well because you can feel it, and to try and get a level that works as well as that, automatically, would be quite a challenge, and we would need to spend quite a fair while working on that before we would have something we were happy with.

Sam: Personally, I don't think there's a substitute for hand-made levels, because every level's different, but if you make an algorithm to create a level for you, it's always going to feel 'the same'.

Kikizo: Although you can do a visualisation automatically though, you have that in there don't you, so that you can have a fireworks visualisation to any user music?

Sam: Yeah, it kind of came from that idea.

Nick: That could potentially be the basis of something 'like' that. But yeah I think to make levels to be as good as we'd like to make them, that's quite a challenge.

Kikizo: Sure. With Gotham, you've demonstrated many times that you really get scoring systems and multipliers, how have you structured the score system in BBR?

Sam: Well as you progress through the level, the better you do, the faster your bar goes up, and the higher your bar is to the top, the more multipliers you get. So, the better players will get to the top higher, so we've tried to adjust the scoring system so that a better player who's detonating the fireworks more accurately, will get to the top multiplier before the other players - and then obviously we've got the bonus run which is 16x multiplier, and providing you stay in the bonus run as long as you can without missing any fireworks, then you maximise your multipliers in there and you get an extra bonus from that, so basically the system was designed to reward the accurate players.

Kikizo: Strategically is there sort of an optimum time to press the trigger and do that thing?

Nick: Well there probably is, but we haven't worked out exactly when it is - we haven't actually worked out how to play the 'perfect game' - we'll let the players work that out for themselves. If you hit every firework perfectly, you'll get a certain score, but then once you've got to that stage, the skill then is knowing when the optimum time is to fire off, and that's a whole new area. That's the next challenge I think.

Kikizo: So you did a demo earlier on Hard and apparently you were good at it, but how quickly do you think it will be before the players start beating the creators in terms of the score they're getting?

Sam: Quite quickly to be honest, a couple of days or something! I can't play the hard levels. A bit of practice maybe...

Nick: In all honestly, obviously we've finished the game now a couple of weeks ago, but even just taking a bit of a break, I think we've lost a bit of the knack for it!

Sam: I nearly beat him earlier, that wouldn't have happened before!

Kikizo: There's no online multiplayer, what's the reason behind that, is it not suitable for this sort of game?

Nick: No, it's really just the timeframe involved, it's something we considered, but it would probably have pushed the launch date back so we wanted to just go with it.

Sam: We thought it was a pretty worthwhile thing doing, but for the effort involved, for this type of title, it wouldn't have given us that much extra - I mean it's so much more enjoyable to play the game in the same room as somebody.

Kikizo: But don't you think latency would be an issue as well, I mean the difference between an 'awesome' hit on-time and a 'perfect' must be like 1/60th of a second?

Sam: We could get around that... it's not out of the question...

Nick: Yeah I am sure there would be some technical challenges but we've got a good network team, they've solved a lot of problems obviously for Gotham in the past, and I think it's something we could hopefully do if we needed.

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